5 Electronic Games from the Pre-LCD Era

Weird products from when CPUs were cheap, but displays were not

Somewhere in the mid-1970s, microprocessor chips became affordable enough to include in toys and games, kicking off the electronic game revolution. But it was not until the early 1980s that the LCD display would be brought to market. Without the cheap display format LCD offered, electronic games had few alternatives for showing what was going on inside the electronics. TV games like Pong and Atari 2600 were coming on the scene, but for the handheld game market, engineers had to get creative.

So, here’s a quick sample of five portable games from that strange post-microprocessor, pre-LCD era. A few iconic. A few, obscure.

5. Entex PacMan 2

Entex Industries was a home electronics powerhouse in the early 1980s and produced a large number of licensed ‘home version’ arcade games, hoping to cash in on the arcade craze. These machines often featured Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFDs), which had a distinctive, glowy, blue/green and orange/red color palette. If you’ve seen the dashboard of Cadillac or other luxury car from the early to mid 1980’s, you know what I mean.